Baker Aims To Accomplish Her Goal The Race For Lehigh County Executive

October 24, 1993|by DAN FRICKER, The Morning Call

Jane S. Baker's penny loafers clacked on the concrete sidewalk. It was a cool, clear evening on S. Delaware Street in Allentown's Westbrook Park. The setting sun illuminated the tops of the maple trees in this neighborhood of tidy brick homes.

A vanguard of four volunteers were fanned out before Baker, knocking on doors. Their job was to hold voters until Baker arrived to deliver her pitch.

She cut across a lawn. Bounded up the steps.

"Hi. I'm Jane Baker," she said, extending a handshake. "I'm going through your neighborhood. I've been a commissioner for eight years and now I'm running for Lehigh County executive. Take a look at the literature and, if you have any questions, there's a phone number here."

Bam!

In less than 30 seconds, Baker had made her appeal and was gone, hopping down the steps, exhorting the volunteers to maintain the pace, extolling the virtues of door-to-door campaigning, zeroing in on the next door and prospective vote.

If there was a metaphor for the campaign and Baker herself, this was it.

Baker, born Jane Schneller, had been raised by a widowed mother whose doctor husband dropped dead of a stroke at age 37. Her mother's example as she raised Baker and two siblings taught Baker a singular lesson:

"Setting the goal and accomplishing it."

The lesson was re-enforced, Baker said, by scholastic field hockey, basketball and tennis.

Baker graduated from Cedar Crest College in 3-1/2 years after marrying James W. Baker after her junior year. There followed a stint teaching at Emmaus Junior High School, raising three children, winning two terms on the county Board of Commissioners and buying a colonial home in an affluent section of Lower Macungie Township.

Baker, 48 and a Republican, is running for county executive after defeating 16-year incumbent David K. Bausch in the party primary last May. She is opposed by Democrat and fellow Commissioner Daniel G. Dougherty.

"I'm good at setting goals and accomplishing them," Baker said when asked to list her strengths.

But Baker's steely pragmatism has been double-edged. Critics, especially in the Bausch administration, have called Baker expedient, politically ambitious, in short, an "Iron Lady."

Baker bristles at the accusation.

"I think whenever the administration had an issue they didn't want to address whether to me or someone else, (an accusation of playing) politics was usually the response," she said.

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The Nov. 2 election will be a watershed in county government and politics.

For the first time since Home Rule started in 1978, someone besides Bausch will oversee daily operations of the $177 million per year government. The executive is paid $49,500 per year and serves four years.

But Baker said much more than a change in administrations is at stake.

She said the county is destined to follow Allentown and become a place that people flee unless the county can curb its $118 million debt, one of the highest per capita in the state.

"I hope to be able to pay the debt without raising taxes. That's my first goal," Baker said.

"If we can't do that, the same thing will happen to Lehigh County as has happened to Allentown, which is people will continue to work in Lehigh but will go home to houses in Berks, Northampton and Carbon, where the taxes are lower."

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Baker was born in 1945 in Kansas City, where her father, Dr. John Schneller, was serving in the Army. After the war, the family returned to Catasauqua.

In 1951, when Baker was 6, her father died. Baker's mother, Janet Class, moved her three young children to a home in West End Allentown the next year.

Class said Baker, her middle child, was an animal lover, resourceful, with a sense of humor and an unusual interest in people.

"She managed to meet an awful lot of people," Class said. "I think when we left Catasauqua, Jane knew more people than I did."

Baker graduated from Allen High School in 1963 and attended Pennsylvania State University before returning to graduate from her mother's alma mater, Cedar Crest College, in December 1967.

Baker taught language arts and history at Emmaus Junior High, leaving to have her first child, Adrienne, in September 1969. James Jr. followed in 1971 and Jessica in 1973.

Baker stayed home to raise the children and renovate the old farmhouse the couple had bought at Wehr's Dam in South Whitehall Township. Baker raised Saint Bernards, and breeding dogs remains a passion. She also tended a large vegetable garden, a sharp contrast to her present businesswoman image.

"I raised sheep, rabbits and dogs," she said.

In January 1980, Baker's life changed when Don Snyder knocked at her door. Snyder, a law school student, planned to run for state representative and had heard through his car pool about a woman near Wehr's Dam who liked politics and was always complaining about the high-power lines that towered near her home.